Kickstart and NFS

What hardware are you using in your compute nodes? What errors show up
on any of the vitual consoles when it fails the NFS mount?
Justin Moore wrote:
>> Hello,
> Due to somewhat frequent disk failures at our cluster, we're working on
> a way to quickly bring a node back up and configured when a replacement
> disk comes in. The stragegy is to use RedHat's kickstart install to get
> the base system installed from a CD. The post-installation script then
> attempts to mount an NFS partition and run a series of scripts from that
> partition. Everything goes well until the host attempts to mount the NFS
> partition. The mount simply doesn't work.
>> The ks.cfg file statically assigns a constant temp IP address which
> will be blown away when the node reboots and obtains its IP through DHCP.
> The NFS server has the IP address in the /etc/exports file, and syslog on
> the server indicates a successful authenticated mount request from that
> IP. The distribution is 6.2 for x86 using kernel version 2.2.14. Looking
> into it more, I find that even a mount request from the command line
> fails, but silently. Even a simple insmod of the various nfs kernel
> modules (sunrpc, lockd, nfs) fails in the same manner.
>> The kickstart documentation is sadly outdated and full of errors. I
> have no problem submitting updates or patches to the project, but for now
> I just want my nodes to come up properly and configured by placing a
> floppy and CD in it and turning it on (I'm lazy like that). I also
> realize this problem is deeper than just kickstart, but I didn't see
> anything on the RedHat-related lists or message boards about kernel module
> problems in 6.2/2.2.14 systems.
>> Has anyone else experienced this, and if so what can I do as a
> work-around?
>> Thank you.
> -jdm
>> ----------------------------
> Justin Moore
> Assistant Centurion SysAdmin
> University of Virginia
>jdm2d at cs.virginia.edu> ----------------------------
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--
Brian D. Haymore
University of Utah
Center for High Performance Computing
155 South 1452 East RM 405
Salt Lake City, Ut 84112-0190
Email: brian at chpc.utah.edu - Phone: (801) 585-1755 - Fax: (801) 585-5366